Labor Unions: A Brood of Vipers
Labor unions make us poorer and they prolong recessions.
Senator Obama’s short-sighted support for wealth-redistribution taxation and for socialist labor unions is nothing new for Democrat/Socialist politicians.
Both in England and in the United States, labor unions led the political assault to overwhelm the individualistic traditions that made those nations great and to impose socialistic planning and regulation.
Between 1933 and 1940, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal nationalized agriculture, promoted the expansion of membership and power of communist-led labor unions, and pushed businesses into the National Recovery Administration (NRA), an imitative version of Mussolini’s Fascist state corporatism.
Liberal-progressives support labor unions because they are, along with the extortionate, class-action tort lawyers, the largest contributors and get-out-the-vote organizations wedded to the Democrat/Socialist party. See Labor Unions: Socialism’s Shock Troops.
Proposed Federal legislation to eliminate secret balloting for workers in union organizing elections, by increasing union membership, will be a major force in socialist wealth redistribution. Unions extort higher wages and benefits, usually beyond their economic worth when measured by international standards. Unfortunately, the effect is to push us all downward toward equal, albeit lower, incomes.
Increased unionization means paying workers more than they are worth in the free market. That reduces the number of jobs, because businesses have to keep total labor costs in check, or they will succumb to foreign competition. Today, GM, Ford, and Chrysler are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, because their union-inflated labor costs are so much higher than those overseas and in non-union foreign auto plants in the United States.
For another aspect of labor unions’ baleful effects, read Labor Unions Prolonged the Depression: Obama wants a new Wagner Act.
So, hang onto your hats after next year if Congress enacts massive new welfare-state benefits programs, raises taxes, and panders to labor unions by raising tariffs, restricting free trade, and curbing outsourcing of over-paid American jobs. The prospect is for a re-run of 1970s stagflation.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
Thomas E. Brewton, who maintains this blog, had the great good fortune in the middle 1950s at Louisiana State University to study under two of the 20th century's great minds: Eric Voegelin in political science, and Walter Berns in Constitutional law. These two professors opened the door of education to a glimpse of Western civilization and of American political and social thought as they had been before socialism was unconstitutionally established as the official national religion of the United States in 1933. | More from Thomas Brewton
Stumble It!
November 1st, 2008 at 5:22 am
Do a little research and you’ll find that union membership in the *private sector* is as low as it’s been in over 60 years.
You will also find that union membership in the *public sector* is at an all-time high.
It seems the people who work in our schools and government offices are the most prolific union supporters. These aren’t people in danger of working 16 hour days, in sweatshop conditions, producing the goods that feed and clothe a nation. These are people who want to raise your taxes, these are people who want to take your children away from you and come after you for child support.
If we’re going to do away with unions, let’s start with public sector parasites, and the American Bar Association, and any other professional unions we can think of, before we talk bad about people who started out trying to secure a living wage for people and stop child labor.
How do we compete with a Chinese workforce that averages 25 or 50 cents an hour?